A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Learn techniques to manage employee multitasking. Specifically, these techniques involve scanning barcodes to manage multiple simultaneous projects.
Employees might be splitting time between multiple jobs as they prepare materials that apply to more than one client or job. Each job gets a little of the total time. Consider this a part of your employee time management strategy.
This is precisely the tool for government, manufacturing, engineering, and civil jobs where efficiency and accountability is so hard to measure, and so easy to hide. Get some real data, guys!
This video should help you understand the purpose and uses for project tasks in Standard Time. Consider using project tasks to schedule employee work, manage projects, and scan barcodes on the shop floor.
Tracking work order time is the first way to improve them. If you can learn how much time goes into each operation of a job you can use that to eek out small percentages of improvement. Or, in some cases completely alter your processes. Sometimes small “bugs” in operational processes are actually just tips of the iceberg. That’s why work order tracking has value.
Consider this little video an inspiration to try the Standard Time® tracking capabilities. You might find something worth correcting. 🙂
Learn what you can do with projects in Standard Time®. Projects represent manufacturing work orders, jobs, sales orders, or any long term work.
Watch the video below for inspiration on how to align your processes to ST projects. You’ll see all the properties of projects. Some may align with your own operations, some may not. Let us know if we’re missing something you absolutely must have!
Do you need to delay the starting date of a task until another task has finished? That’s a link relationship! This video shows how to create that link relationship, and what they look like in a Gantt chart.
Watch for the words Predecessor and Successor. Those are important labels we give to tasks that precede and to tasks that succeed others. In other words, upstream and downstream tasks… before and after.
Predecessors and Successors are important for scheduling jobs and tasks.
Part 2 of the automated job scheduling series goes deeper into workstation and task configuration. Watch the video below and try it for yourself.
Learn how to automatically assign tasks to workstations or machines for job scheduling. This video shows how “Skills” or machine purposes, or kinds of work are used to assign tasks to machines so that jobs are scheduled to run at the next available time slots.
Got a hot job that needs to run now? There’s a menu command for that.
How about a low-priority job? There’s a menu command for that.
Get inspiration to schedule jobs with the quick video below.
Here’s an easy way to create new work orders in Standard Time®. The “Project Assistant” in this video steps through all the pages of a new project.
And did you know, once you have created a project, you can create a copy from it? Creating a duplicate of an existing project is even simpler. Just right-click on any project and choose Duplicate! Now you have a new work order that is ready to scan!
Watch this video for inspiration. 🙂
Follow these steps to prep a new job for the shop floor. Once prepped, employees can scan the job name and tasks. A timer will start. They can scan again to stop that timer. Now you’ve got timestamped records of all employee working on jobs.